Three New Jersey mobsters (allegedly) are sitting in a car, discussing their favourite TV show. "I'm telling you, you gotta watch," says one member of the DeCavalcante family, convinced that said show is based on his own activities. "Yeah, but where do they get the information from?" wonders Joseph "Tin Ear" Sclafani. "What characters! Great acting," chips in Anthony Rotondo.
The FBI wiretap which revealed this expert critique was taped last spring, as not just the mob but the whole of America was falling in love with The Sopranos, David Chases's brilliant, multi-layered portrait of everyday life in the New Jersey Cosa
Nostra, featuring the towering James Gandolfini as troubled Mafia boss Tony Soprano.
The Sopranos was the phenomenon on US television last year - while the new series, which started in January, is receiving equally ecstatic reviews and even higher ratings figures than the last. Laden with Emmys, garlanded with Golden Globes, the show has captured the imagination of the country, even though it's on a cable channel received by only one in 10 households. On this side of the Atlantic, Channel 4 had the chutzpah to start the series in what are traditionally the dog days of the TV year, the first weeks of August. It was an excellent strategy for those of us longing for something to watch at that point, but it did cause a problem for the many viewers who missed the first couple of episodes. Because this is not one of those easily-packaged, each-show-stands-alone series - it demands a little more attention than that - many of those who came in late were left floundering. Three cheers, then, for RTE, which will be broadcasting the whole series from Monday night.
It has been pointed out that the show's hero, Tony - a philandering baby boomer, plagued by self-doubt, surrounded by enemies, distrusted by his wife - bears some resemblance to a certain president of the United States, right down to the absurdly hippy-ish name of his beloved teenage daughter (Meadow). And there's no doubt that Tony is in many ways the American Everyman of his generation: prosperous, successful, but plagued by a nameless dread, a feeling that life is either meaningless or has passed him by. He's not too far removed from the middle-class depressives of the novels of John Updike or Richard Ford - except for the fact that he's a murderous criminal who whacks people for a living.
"If one family doesn't get him, the other one will," ran the teaser slugline for the first series of The Sopranos. Of course, that's always been one of the great attractions of the Mob to film-makers, the opportunity to blend the domestic with grand guignol, blood-spattered corpses with spaghetti sauce like momma used to make. Great Mafia movies like The Godfather and GoodFellas played on the notion of parallel families. The Sopranos (which is jam-packed with references to those films) takes those parallels to their logical conclusion. One of the unusual things about the show is the juicy female roles it offers: there's Tony's wife (Edi Falco), his shrink (Lorraine Bracco), and perhaps the most memorable, his monstrous mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand).
But it's touches like that shrink which place The Sopranos at the heart of the modern American Zeitgeist. Tony Soprano, as played by Gandolfini, may just look like another brutish capo, but he's got problems we can all empathise with. Panic attacks. Sleepless nights. Disturbing erotic dreams. Not to mention job insecurity in a profession where redundancy means showing up in a dumpster with a cheesewire around your neck. Popping Prozac keeps some of Tony's demons at bay, but only for a while.
It's not all gloom and depression. Some of the funniest dialogue comes from the assorted bunch of half-wits, egomaniacs and human breeze blocks who make up Tony's mob. Characters like Big Pussy who, told in a Starbucks-type coffee shop that "the cafe du jour is New Zealand peaberry", explodes, "F**king espresso, cappuccino, we created this s**t!" "Oh, again with the rape of the culture," fellow-gangster Walnuts responds wearily, before shoplifting a designer coffeepot.
As the most successful show ever on cable television, The Sopranos marks a major milestone for those predicting the death of American network TV. Ironically, the cable channel, HBO, only picked it up after the concept was turned down by all four major networks. Now the networks are scrambling to catch up, with a raft of mob drama series in the pipeline for this year. Yet again, though, cable has shown it can touch the parts the networks can't reach - discerning adults, usually better-off, who prefer their drama more subtle and adult-orientated.
"Shows like The Sopranos and Sex in the City just enhance HBO's profile in the minds of the viewers," says Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Television. "And that can't be good for those of us in the broadcast networks."
There's nothing particularly new about HBO, which started off almost 20 years ago as a first-run movie channel, not dissimilar to Sky Movies on this side of the Atlantic. The difference is that, unlike Sky, HBO has gone seriously into producing its own original programming in recent years - quality oneoff dramas, comedies and series (like the now sadly-departed Larry Sanders Show) which provide a hipper, sharper alternative to the often bland output of the established networks. But The Sopranos is something else again.
"The Sopranos is our first phenomenon," says Chris Albrecht, HBO's president of original programming. "It's something that has previously been limited to broadcast television only."
"A lot of people think: `Now we can write f**k instead of screw," says Chase. "But that's not the important part of the freedom. At HBO you're allowed to tell stories in unconventional ways, with a slow build. They don't freak out if not all the information's vomited out and viewers say: `Gee, I wonder what that means.' Network TV is about people talking and communicating and coming out with a resolution at the end. With The Sopranos, people talk to each other and they really aren't communicating. That's what happens in life. We're all kind of speaking the wrong language."
The Sopranos starts on RTE1 at 10 p.m. on Monday €1, 10 p.m.)
